With Christmas and New Year’s falling on Wednesdays, the calendar has afforded us more time to reflect on 2019. The decade ended with a bang – 2019 was the single best year in the past ten years for the MSCI All Country World index and the S&P 500 missed sharing the same status by less […]
Rarely in markets can we be completely certain of what is causing them to move. The industry joke is, “more sellers than buyers,” when equity markets head lower. We find ourselves in one of those rare moments where there is no question around what is causing the current selloff. First, a timeline: On July 31st, […]
Q1 2019 Recap What a difference a quarter makes. Q1 2019 ended with global markets up sharply against the backdrop of weakening global growth. The first three months of the year registered the best quarterly return for the S&P 500 in over nine years. We have to go back to Q2 and Q3 of 2009, […]
It feels strange to start this post with a New Year salutation as we are now officially three weeks into 2019. For a variety of reasons, we held off on an update until now. We were hoping to see a resolution to both the ongoing trade talks with China and the government shutdown. Neither has […]
Sixty-four. Sixty-four trading days is all it took to wipe out what had been an +11.2% year-to-date gain on the S&P 500 and turn the year into nearly an -8% loss. If Friday had been the last day of the quarter, which it was not, Q4 2018 would rank as the sixth worst quarter in […]
We’re there… This week, amidst one of the worst one-day declines in the past decade, a portion of the treasury yield curve inverted. What is “inversion?” Inversion, also referred to as “going negative,” is the term used to describe a unique shape of a yield curve. Typically, the yield curve is upward sloping, and intuitively […]
“Are we having fun yet?” We were asked this by a client in late October as the S&P 500 was approaching correction territory. We thought it appropriate to take stock of the month since it was the first month since our inception where the US equity market was negative. We, like our clients, are glad […]
Oh, how quickly things change. We originally planned on releasing our Q3 update after the September payrolls release (10/5) because we believed this would give us insight into the Federal Reserve and whether or not they will raise rates (for a fourth time this year and a ninth time this cycle) in December. While we […]
One theme that has been constant over the past nine years (since the official end of the Great Recession) has been the hunt for the next recession. This expansion is officially the second longest in history at 108 months, overtaking the 1960s expansion by two months and bearing down on the longest expansion in history […]
The arguments for owning EM are well-documented – young populations, low debt to GDP ratios, high growth rates, supportive demographic trends (with a few notable exceptions) and plenty of room to increase productivity are just some of the most common qualities cited for owning EM. Despite all these tailwinds, both earnings and market levels are […]